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MILOVAN DESTIL MARKOVIĆ

(b. in 1957 in Čačak, Serbia. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)

 

Milovan Destil Marković is a conceptual artist whose practice spans installation, painting, performance, and video. Marković studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Arts, Belgrade, where he graduated in 1983. He has lived and worked in Berlin since 1986. Defining himself as a conceptual painter, Marković has exhibited extensively in Europe, Asia, Australia, and in the Americas. Marković’s works are held by numerous public and private collections throughout the world, including: Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany; Museum of the City of Belgrade, Serbia; Istanbul Art Museum Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia; Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Germany; Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria; The Artists’ Museum, Lodz, Poland; MOMENTUM, Berlin, Germany; amongst others.

Marković’s work has been featured in the 42nd Venice Biennial (Aperto ’86); 4th Istanbul Biennial; 46th Venice Biennial; 6th Triennial New Delhi, India; the 56th, 49th, 24th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale; 2018 Lorne Sculpture Biennale; Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art Kumamoto; MoMA PS1, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken; The Artist’s Museum, Lodz; National Museum, Prague; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; MSURS Museum of Contemporary Art, Banja Luka; Landesmuseum Graz; Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf; Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; National Gallery, Athens; Art Museum Foundation Military Museum, Istanbul; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kunstverein Hamburg; Kunstvoreningen Bergen; Kunstverein Jena; Galleri F15 Oslo; Nishido Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Fei Contemporary Art Center, Shanghai; the art program of the European Capitol of Culture Novi Sad; and many other notable institutions.


 

SUNSET!

Sunset on 16.02.2016 in Bundanon, NSW, Australia.

2016, Pigments on Canvas, 70 x 70 cm

 

 

Milovan Destil Marković’s series of Transfigurative Paintings are the result of intensive research and the attempt to develop and expand the idea of the portrait. In his ongoing series of Barcode Paintings, Markovitch uses barcodes to signify written words through colourful, bright stripes on his canvases. Every text can be translated into a barcode that is the product of a systematic process of codification, at the end of which only a rhythmic series of vertical lines remains. This abstraction allows for an international rationalized system of merchandise management, the organisation and distribution of commodities. In Marković’s work, there is a tension between the image as an abstract painting and the barcode as algorithmic script. The content of each image is revealed through the title of the painting.

His works contain short text quotations from pornographic literature, politics and banking; representations of the world of power and oppression. Marković’s barcode paintings veil their content behind a normalised form; at once the language of commerce, and a kind of digital calligraphy. They can be understood either as an impish joke on the part of the artist, or as a critique of the opaque structures of markets that mask their global deficiencies and injustices. As a sly comment on the possibility of art as commodity, printed on the side of each painting is a barcode: the normal-sized, black and white version of the content of each barcode painting. Sunset! is a landscape painting, taking as its subject the date and location of a sunset witnessed by the artist while on an Artist Residency in Bundanon, NSW, Australia.



 

Messenger Irma / Messenger Dora / Messenger Megi / Messenger Maria / Messenger Mangkhut [Barcode: Commodity Dream]

2021, 5 framed prints, ink print on paper, each 29 x 42 cm (53 x 63 cm with frame)

 

 

The five prints shown in this exhibition are digital studies for a series of five large paintings (each 300 x 200 cm) from Marković’s conceptual practice of Barcode Paintings, with which he has been working since 2008. This body of work consists of stripes that signify written words, often intertwined with visual imagery. Barcodes are the product of a systematic process of codification, at the end of which only a rhythmic series of vertical lines remains. Every text can be translated into a barcode and thereby enter the system of global trade. It is possible to scan the bar code with a laser reader or a smartphone app to decode its meaning. Marković’s seemingly abstract images can thus be translated into concrete content.

Marković’s Messengers series is composed of spatial images that, by means of abstract coding, thematize the relationship between environmental destruction through climate change, toxic pollution, current and historical economic interests and their impact on the planet Earth. The five prints consist of barcodes intertwined with satellite images of hurricanes and typhoons which have hit various geographical regions since 2010. Each of these works is composed of an interwoven matrix of barcode and meteorological satellite image of a natural disaster. The barcodes embedded in these works translate to the term “Commodity Dream”. While the titles of the works, taken from the sweetly innocent female names given to these hurricanes and typhoons by the World Meteorological Organization, form a stark counterpoint to the harsh truths and tragic aftermath of such natural disasters.

This body of work conceptually and visually addresses the effects of climate change leading to super-storms and massive fires (which the artist has experienced in recent years in Australia), resulting in damage, death and displacement on a massive scale. This environmental devastation is a consequence of the climate catastrophe resulting from humankind’s mistreatment of the planet which sustains us; a vicious cycle pulling us ever closer to the brink of disaster. Driven by human greed and anomalous management of resources, large geographical areas of healthy nature are disappearing from the face of the Earth due to economic colonization and ecocide by aggressive corporations. The Messengers series addresses how the profit-oriented focus of humanity is a disastrous commodification of the world. If things continue as they are, human greed will turn our planet into a consumed good, like any other commodity.

– Milovan Destil Marković



 

Watch here the Spotlight interview with Milovan Destil Marković